


Waltz

by OmegaZeta5



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Edelgard remembers Dimitri, F/M, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, Fluff, Fuck Canon, Pining, Pre-Timeskip | Academy Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Romance, Some Humor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-18 00:56:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29850156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OmegaZeta5/pseuds/OmegaZeta5
Summary: A work exploring a relationship between two people who are destined to walk different paths.They looked at each other, the air warm and wet with their lips so close. In that moment, all conscious thought seemed to leave them. Nothing about the dreams of yesterday or the fears of tomorrow. Just them, in a moment that time wouldn’t set free. Neither of them wanted to look away.Then Caspar rang the bell, and the Eagles were clamoring over their victory. Edelgard blinked and the moment snapped. She helped Dimitri up. Their classes swarmed them, some in cheer and some in groans, and all utterly ignorant.They were both still looking at each other.They were both doomed.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Edelgard von Hresvelg
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	Waltz

**Author's Note:**

> So, this fic sort of spawned from two things:  
> 1\. A good friend of mine quickly became obsessed with this pairing after playing the game, and their obsession infected me a little  
> 2\. I was curious to try out third-person omniscient POV, since I've never done it before. So if there's any feedback or critique in regards to that, I'd absolutely love to hear it haha
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

On the eve of the Monastery Ball, a pair of couples danced. They swayed to and fro across the Reception Hall in a traditional waltz, a customary waltz. Honest in its time signatures and true in its steps. Simple. Easy as their shared smiles.

The dancers passed each other often. The Prince led his partner, the Princess hers. Stepping and twirling, round and round. 

The Prince and Princess did not look at each other. In fact, they acted as if they never knew each other at all. 

* * *

Winning the very first mock battle of the year was cause for celebration. The Lions held that honor, and Dimitri didn’t feel as happy as someone in his position probably should have. He sat with the rest of his peers in the Reception Hall, sure, and he engaged with them in their camaraderie, of course. Annette had just blustered through a well-meant remark about their professor, and Sylvain was as quick to jump on it as Ingrid was to jump on him for doing so. Yes, Dimitri sat amidst their smiles and their laughter, and he even smiled a little himself every now and then. Not one of his peers caught how often his attention seemed to slip away. Not even Dedue, and if Dedue could not catch something then not a single soul in Garreg Mach could.

“Will you excuse me for a moment?” Dimitri said. He smiled one of his smiles and the sincerity in it bought him his freedom from his burgeoning class. He showed this same sincerity moving through the throng of students mingling and chatting away between tables. They were not so quick to return it. They were from classes with less reason to. He did not falter.

Then he reached her, and he all but stumbled.

“Good evening,” he said, clearing his throat.

Edelgard blinked. She had been sitting with a sulk and she had been sitting alone. Tucked away in a corner, resting her chin in her hand and squinting, thinking of things she dared not utter in front of her peers. So she'd let them run free through the Hall, after a closing speech she'd deemed satisfying enough, about how this failure was to be their only failure, and how she expected far better results in the year to come. Even then, they'd hardly had the discipline to listen. To lose to a tactician like Claude would have been one thing. To lose to a man like Dimitri was like being the villain of someone else's legend. 

And now he was here, and now she was looking. She did not understand this new stroke of his or the purpose of it. So when she straightened up in that proper manner which felt almost second nature to her, and turned her face blank in that practiced way which had long ensured her survival in a world as cruel as theirs, she did so with the intent she brought to all unexpected ventures: conquer.

“Good evening,” she said.

Dimitri cleared his throat again. “I wanted to express my amazement at your tactics earlier today, but it seems my words have all flown south for the season.”

“...So they have.”

It was borrowed time, and Dimitri knew it. A minute or two longer and they’d be swamped by their own students. Gossip would flourish. Rumors would blossom. Edelgard would not have that one bit. She had made that very clear the minute they first saw each other this school year, in something that wasn’t words but wasn’t quite silence, either. In that very same expression she held him under right now. And the clock was ticking.

“It was a simple mistake which bought us our victory, truthfully,” Dimitri said. “Had we failed to capitalize on such a slight error, I, well...I believe we’d be holding a very different sort of discussion right now.” He chanced a laugh. 

“A slight error.”

Dimitri’s smile weakened. “Only in the sense that your aggression was ill-timed. Had you sent your mage to draw us in later, I-”

“Do you do this often, Your Highness?” Her gaze was shrewder, now. Colder. “Lecture the enemy after the fact? I’m curious.”

They were words meant for cutting, for killing. Edelgard prided herself on her ability to strike hard and strike fast, to eliminate any possible threat before it could possibly know itself as one. They could never hope to hurt Dimitri the way her eyes did at that very moment. His own fell away, and when they returned to match hers they brought his smile back with them. He failed to hide the resignation in it. “I suppose my own curiosity got the best of me. My apologies, Edelgard, I—by your leave.”

“By yours, Your Highness.”

He’d retreated, then. She’d wondered who exactly had taught him this particular brand of etiquette. She felt very strongly that they ought to be hanged, whoever they were. In a society such as the one she found herself trapped in, he was a floundering fish against its marble foundations. Edelgard allowed herself a small huff, watching him go. Still, one could say it hadn't been too painful. And there was something you could see in the intent of it, which Edelgard knew now, and would claim to have always known if put on the spot for it. 

For a moment it had been as if the past four years hadn’t happened. As if they were still what they once were, where they once were. A place where they could still laugh. A place where they could still dance. 

Edelgard considered the conversation a stroke parried. An intrusion conquered. She left it at that, filed it away with all the other battles won and the many yet to come. She considered it so even as the faint echoes of something long buried curled her lips.

* * *

The professors at Garreg Mach weren’t terribly original. In a Monastery as old and historied as theirs, the faculty often figured what wasn’t broken wasn’t worth fixing. So it’d only been a matter of time before they tried to kill one bird with two stones.

Two classes found themselves in such a predicament one fogged and early morning in the Oghma mountain range, brisk and shivering in the cold as they stood around waiting for Byleth to finish negotiations with Manuela: which group got the privilege of keeping this spot for the day’s training exercises, and which ought to shove off and find someplace better?

Some students were more patient than others. Edelgard was not one of them. “Honestly,” she muttered under her breath, tapping her foot with her arms crossed. To keep her head from shaking was to wipe the glare from her gaze: impossible. This year was quickly proving to be busier than most—the last thing she needed was to be slowed down in any capacity. Dorothea still hadn’t gotten the hang of Thunder, Bernadetta needed to learn how to hold a bow if she ever hoped to fire it, and Ferdinand still thought he was the true leader of their class. In the mind of a young woman who couldn’t hope to be anything but her title, ruts like these needed to be stamped out as quickly as they appeared. So much to do. To plan. To hide. 

She couldn’t afford a single distraction. None at all. So, naturally, a new one cropped up in her path.

Edelgard stomped over to a Lions student wholly incapable of wielding his axe. She took it from his hands without asking, she reformed his grip on the pommel without asking, and as is customary of Edelgard, she terrified him through one of her many lectures without asking.

Ashe managed to squeeze a few stammers in here and there. “Y-you have my thanks, Lady Edelgard,” was the most discernible sentence in between her monologues, and his smile continued to weaken as a growing panic gripped him frantically. He was a simple but well-meaning boy in desperate need of a savior.

“Ashe! Thank the heavens, we were just looking for you,” Dimitri said with a brisk smile. “Annette’s axe is a mite too big for her—any hope for a trade?”

Ashe scampered off as quickly as he could. Dimitri and Edelgard stood alone, side by side as they surveyed their classes. 

"So," he said. "Some morning, isn't it?" 

"Your students need more thorough instruction," she said. "A grip like that on an axe has a better chance of killing the wielder than it does anyone else." 

"I appreciate your concern," he said, and meant it. 

Edelgard shook her head. The classes were mingling too much for her tastes. She had half a mind to march her way between Sylvain and Dorothea, tell the boy to mind his own peers. If she managed to see the irony in such an opinion, then she wouldn’t be Edelgard. 

Dimitri glanced her a little. She stared straight ahead. He hesitated. “I believe negotiations are almost done,” he said.

“So they are.”

“You were here first,” he admitted. “It’d only be right of Byleth to concede our class.”

“So it would.”

He hesitated once more. With her, he was a man utterly composed of hesitation. How far could he step? How much could he chance? The cold seemed to stir a sort of Kingdom courage in him, a breath that coaxed him into edging further onward. “This chill. It’s almost homely.”

“Is it?”

A tone lacking her trademark condescension. “It truly is,” he said. “A summer morning in Fhirdiad feels just like this.”

Edelgard shot him a single glance. Then she stared straight ahead again. “I suppose it may.”

Dimitri’s heart thumped at a more eager pace. “I must admit, it's...almost nostalgic. I didn’t expect to feel it so _strongly_."

"None ever do," she said. So far so good.

"Though I suppose it’s a rather normal occurrence, isn’t it? To miss home?”

“I wouldn’t know of it.”

And there it was. The flat lack of familiarity in her voice, all business. Like she didn’t remember, wouldn’t remember. He had stepped too far. Dimitri looked ahead in their shared view of the morning field. His heart slowed to a more decadent thump.

“Right,” he said. A note of forlorn dejection he couldn’t hide if he tried. “I...I suppose you wouldn’t.”

* * *

The Garland Moon was a time for sweeter happenings than what could be found in an infirmary. It coaxed a more easygoing nature from the students, unwound them for a moment from their growing tension and stress in the face of a daunting school year. Less of a chance for slip-ups, for injuries. For mistakes.

Dimitri had not seen his presence here as one of those at all. Not for the past week he’d lain bedridden in Manuela’s workshop, not on the field of Magdred Way fending off Lonato’s men, and certainly not when he took the arrow in the gut that by all rights should have been in Felix’s. That boy for his part hadn’t visited Dimitri once. Dimitri couldn’t find it in himself to mind very much. The wound could sting and sting and Manuela could poke and prod in her nursing, but Dimitri just never minded. Some would call a young man in his late teens who never complained about anything very strange. Dimitri wouldn’t see the problem.

The only problem he saw was the lives he’d had to take on that bloodstained field.

Dimitri bit his tongue. He’d shifted a bit too much. The wound felt like it’d reopened again, beneath the freshly changed gauze. He’d had to apply them himself. Manuela was not here this morning. She often wasn’t. Dimitri couldn’t complain. The morning light filtered through the curtains enclosing his bed, and they seemed to add to the ache in his head he just couldn’t shake.

The curtain drew back. Edelgard looked at Dimitri with the expression of someone who was expecting someone else. Both of them forgot whatever it was they’d been thinking about and for a moment they just stared at each other.

“Good morning,” Dimitri said.

“You are not Bernadetta.”

Dimitri looked down at himself. He was in a pair of pants and a shirt, both cotton. “I don’t believe I am.”

Edelgard sighed, slipped back into her usual demeanor. “Where is she?”

“I wouldn’t know.” Dimitri frowned. “Bernadetta’s here?”

She rolled her jaw. An instinctive need to shield any sort of response on any given topic. Even when the subject matter wouldn’t endanger those carefully constructed plans of hers. “Unfortunately.”

“My sincerest apologies. What ails her?”

Shield. “What ails you?”

Dimitri told her freely and openly. Edelgard stood in her Edelgard way, hand on her hip, defiant in the face of the truth. She studied him, surveyed his condition. Dimitri felt that odd and unknown urge to squirm most boys did when they fell under a lady’s scrutiny.

“A week’s time is too long for such an injury,” she declared. “What has Manuela been doing?”

“Not very much, to be quite frank,” Dimitri said, laughing a little. A little too much. The pain seized in his core again, a gnarled bite. He tried to hide his wince.

Edelgard huffed. “Let me see.”

She strode over in the span of time it took Dimitri to blink. Sitting on the edge of the bed with her back to him, gloved hand running beneath his shirt. He couldn’t be anything other than stunned, and she couldn’t be anything other than who she was. Her glove was a little cool. She drew it back, sniffed the fingertips.

“This isn’t the proper salve,” she said. “Who applied it?

Manuela had, the night prior. “I did,” Dimitri said.

Edelgard shook her head and she knew he was lying. “She’s covering this topic in her own lecture this week, and then she does this. Goddesses.”

“Life as a professor and a physician must be very taxing,” Dimitri argued.

“Excuses are for those lacking the strength to avoid them,” Edelgard said. She regarded him for a second. Then she stood up. “I’ll bring the proper bottle on my way back.”

“Oh, truly, that won’t be-”

“Dimitri, honestly, do you think us children still?”

Dimitri stared at her. Edelgard regretted it instantly. She’d broken her own vow of silence. A plan gone out the window, the first of many. But he’d been so frustrating. He’d always been to her, in that way an overbearing brother was to a sister who didn’t want to lose him. It was not an easy pull to ignore no matter how hard she tried. 

“No, I…” Dimitri hesitated. “I know we’re not.”

Edelgard funneled her resolve into her carefully manufactured face again. “Bruised shins, scraped knees. Small things for boys and girls to laugh at, to forget about. An injury like this directly impedes your duties as house leader.”

His gaze fell, and he rolled her sentiment over in his head. A teenager often knows such words but fails to understand them, no matter how much he or she knows they should. “You’re right. Of course, I—of course.”

She nodded, but some of the frost had left her gaze. Because it was precisely his duties as a leader that had landed him here in the first place. “I’ll bring the proper salve.”

Dimitri watched her draw the curtain back. He swallowed. “Wait.”

Edelgard was not a woman known for waiting. She stopped, looked back at him. A neutral expression.

“What’s wrong with Bernadetta?”

Edelgard blinked. Even now, this unrelenting concern for others. He would not understand the cause of her surprise even if she grabbed him by the face and shook him. Then she scoffed. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing’s wrong with Bernadetta.”

Dimitri’s brow scrunched up as he frowned. Edelgard let him stew on that as she went to pick up a student whose only reason for being here was because few others were. If she had stayed she would have seen how his face lit up as the understanding reached him, and seen how warm his smile grew in the face of something he’d discovered wasn’t quite as lost as he’d thought it’d been.

The Garland Moon was a time for sweet happenings. An infirmary was a place for mistakes.

* * *

Everyone deals with nightmares differently. A common throughline is the near unexplainable urge to leave your bed in search of someplace else. Someplace different. Better? What could be better than the place you often felt safest?

For Dimitri, it was the training grounds. A stone expanse beneath starlit sky, devoid of students or guards or instructors. Dimitri’s never snuck out past curfew before. He’s never had a curfew to sneak out from, before. One of the many luxuries of being born royalty. Could such a title truly be called luxury when it was the source of so much strife? Duties, responsibilities. Whisperings of the dead. One of those may not be so common a symptom as the rest.

Dimitri wasn’t sure what he was going to do, standing out there on the grounds with the training lance in hand. He wasn’t sure if there was anything _to_ do. He’d put up no dummies, no vacant targets. Nothing to hit. Nothing to kill. They were empty. They would not satiate his luxury. So perhaps he would just stand there, with the moonlight basking his face in a near-white glow, waiting for those gone to truly leave him. Silent. Alone.

And then he truly wasn’t. Because Edelgard’s snuck out four times this past moon already, and no one told him the grounds were her favorite spot to wander to.

“Manuela tells me it’s normal,” she said, sitting beside him on the steps. She’d only done so after standing all the way across the grounds from him for the first twenty or so minutes, and even he’d been able to point out the ludicrousy of the act. “This happens sometimes. This moon...the Blue Sea stirs at people’s thoughts, some.”

Dimitri didn’t like to put much stock into that. The students had enough trouble on their minds already, after the Mausoleum raid. They didn’t need legends of a whispering star rousing them from slumber too restless for them in the first place. And he couldn’t be affected by such a star’s beckoning, anyway. Such whispers would drown in the screams of the damned he’d heard for the past four years.

“So what do you dream about?” he said. He did not expect an honest answer. Whether he could truly discern the honesty of anything Edelgard said was something that never crossed his mind.

She sat and thought for a minute. There was a wide catalogue of images to choose from. Her sisters shackled and caged, her brothers listless with eyes bloodshot. Rusted chains in a caverned dungeon. Sometimes she woke up and she could still hear their wails and she would look around her room and there would be no one there. There would never be anyone there ever again. She would never admit the reality of the tears slipping down her cheeks. Especially to herself.

To tell him any of that was to give some part of herself away. And she couldn’t give anything away. To him, least of all. So she racked her mind for something that seemed reasonable, a landscape or a memory someone like Dimitri would realistically buy. Something that felt real.

She looked at him, his clear face in a breezeless and cool night, open and waiting. Just as it always was.

It escaped her before she had the chance to rein it in. “The slipper.”

He lit up immediately. The snapshot was so vivid, so _there_. Him chasing after a girl in the streets of a dead Fhirdiad night, waving that chewed-up slipper around like it was a lifeline and calling after her because it was really late and whoever she was, he was certain she’d scraped her knees hopping over the fence of the Palace courtyard. He’d fought tooth and nail with a pack of strays to get that slipper back. And she hadn’t cared because she’d been crying. She’d told him to go away, and so he’d sat there with her beneath the archway, that hopeless piece of footwear clutched awkwardly in his hands. He’d sat there with her until the sun rose the next morning. Because he couldn’t understand who or what would ever want to make such a pretty girl cry.

It wasn’t until later when he found out they were siblings by marriage, and it wasn’t until even later than that when Edelgard had thanked him for what he’d done. A brusque thanks, said in passing with her eyes darted away. It’d been a slipper rendered wholly useless, and she’d never been able to salvage it. It didn’t matter.

It was the first time he saw her. It was the only time he ever saw her cry. She never told him why she did.

“You...you truly remember that?” Dimitri said.

Edelgard wasn’t looking at him, now. Her ears felt alarmingly warm. She was wondering why the moon had to be so bright tonight. He could see it all if he really wanted to. “Some of it.”

Dimitri didn’t say anything. Silence engulfed them both. When he spoke again, his smile was clear in his voice. Gentle and touched. “I’m glad.”

She didn’t know why he had to say it like that, in such a way. It was just a shoe. When she spoke again, it was low and the words seemed frightened to leave her. “I’m glad as well.”

Everyone deals with nightmares differently. Some of them find a place better than their beds. Some of them lie.

* * *

They didn't find each other on those grounds again until the next moon’s end. The Lions’ assignment had extracted a heavy toll on their spirits, and the Eagles had been similarly disenfranchised. Someone had brought up the idea of an inter-house tournament, one of the Eagles, and then that Eagle had told another Eagle and then a Lion’d overheard and it’d gone on and on until they all found themselves here. They’d wisely kept it among themselves, scheduled it on the Deer’s day of departure. They knew Claude was sensitive. 

Winners got a nice silver sword for their efforts. Losers got what losers often get: shame.

Sylvain returned to his side of the field bruised and panting. He’d been grinning when he stepped up. Then Edelgard happened. “Alright, Your Highness,” he said, smacking Dimitri on the shoulder, “you’re up.”

Dimitri felt it was all a little unfair. The way things were set up, his entire class had had to go through Edelgard by simple matter of random chance. With their placings decided on dice rolls, either one of them could’ve ended up dead last to step into the arena or been the very first to go. Edelgard hadn’t quite had that good a spot of luck; she’d placed second. And Dimitri was last.

“Seems we have a straggler, gentlemen,” Edelgard said.

He put it out of his mind as best he could, setting up shop a few paces across her. If he had to make his way through the likes of Ferdinand or Hubert after beating Edelgard, then so be it. Perhaps he may even break a sweat or two. Then again, Edelgard hadn’t. She stood poised and confident as she always did, armed and ready with the axe in her hand. Dimitri found it hard to keep his smile down. This was business, he needed to act as such. Their house’s pride was on the line. It was also a game, though, wasn’t it?

“If you’d care to tell Claude of your class’s loss yourself upon his return, I’d be more than happy to oblige,” he said.

“I’m afraid it’s not a liberty I’m privy to extend,” Edelgard said but she smiled a little too. She hadn’t spoken of that night again, between them. She made a great effort not to speak to him at all, beyond the necessary courtesies. She thought she was falling back on her own mandation, blocking out the distraction of a sibling attending the same school year as her. She truly did.

Dimitri settled into his stance. “Ready when you are,” he said, and they both were, so when they stepped forward they did so at the same time.

It was a miracle their weapons didn’t shatter. That first blow, lance against axe. It was like a lightning bolt crackling through the grounds. Then another. And another. Swing after swing, blow after blow, again and again. She’d sidestep and twist, he’d parry and thrust. Their determination was shared, their undying will to win. And everything came into being between them in a way it hadn’t quite before. They were able to taste the iron in the air, see a speck of dust on the column across the courtyard. Their gaze was locked and their very breath was shared. They were there when they hadn’t been before. They were alive. They were dancing.

It was like walking on a tightrope. The more you looked down and realized how high up you were, the more your legs wobbled until you suddenly found yourself falling. Which is exactly what Dimitri did, when he blinked and he felt what they were both feeling but not seeing. She entered his defensive bubble, smacked his lance away and since she was a lady of conquering she felt that instinctive need to make sure her opponent couldn’t get up again. She was not seeing.

Then his back was against the floor and she was almost straddling him, her hair over her face and her pants fluttering the strands, the axe at his face. The shock in his eyes. It could never match hers, because Edelgard was never truly shocked by anything. Not in a long, long time.

They looked at each other, the air warm and wet with their lips so close. In that moment, all conscious thought seemed to leave them. Nothing about the dreams of yesterday or the fears of tomorrow. Just them, in a moment that time wouldn’t set free. Neither of them wanted to look away.

Then Caspar rang the bell, and the Eagles were clamoring over their victory. Edelgard blinked and the moment snapped. She helped Dimitri up. Their classes swarmed them, some in cheer and some in groans, and all utterly ignorant. 

They were both still looking at each other.

They were both doomed.


End file.
